Page 70 of Siege of Shadows

Plan B was hitting him really hard on the back of his neck. I was fast, too fast for him to react. He went down, but I grabbed him before he could make a sound and dragged him into the study.Don’t get caught, Chae Rin had said. Well, that was out of the question now. Maybe I could bribe Crane into silence with another autograph once he woke up. At any rate, all the security guards would have to check in, which meant I didn’t have much time in here.

The study was a musty, oval-shaped delicacy of books; one long mahogany case curved around about half the structure as if it’d been built especially for this room. Beautiful nineteenth-century portraits of old people hung around the room. A lavish rug lined the wooden floor, but there were only a few sitting chairs in the room: a couple by the left sections of bookcase, one behind the large desk where the bookcase ended, and a maroon-and-brown patterned settee in front of the fireplace by the right wall. But the main piece of the study had to be the statue at the room’s center—another woman with a pearl, carved in white stone. The smooth groove representing her eyes felt somehow hollow and knowing. She was just like the other two.

No, not quite like the others. Each of the statues had been a little different, their hand positions and body poses slightly unique. This one curved her arms inward, hugging the pearl to her chest as if to protect what was hers. Blackwell sure had strange taste in décor.

Crane was out cold, but he wouldn’t be forever. I’d have to think of some excuse once he did wake up, but for now I had to find that Castor Volume. The rest I’d figure out later.

After dragging his body inside a closet of smoking jackets, I put my phone on vibrate so no sudden rings would give me away. Then I started to search the books on the shelves.

“Okay, here we go.” I scanned the bookshelf, tracing my fingers down the spines of first editions to check names. Blackwell did have the Volumes in his study. A couple of them were missing from the shelves, but thankfully, the first volume was here. The giant tome was as heavy as it looked, so big I had to carry it in the crook of my arms. The pages were thin and slippery. Hundreds of them. There was no way I’d get through all of this in time.

“Thanks, Belle.” I rubbed the back of my neck because the band was nevernotitchy.

I set the book down on the desk. Then, dropping my bag to the floor, I plopped into Blackwell’s chair with a heavythumpand a heavier sigh. Hard to believe Castor had originally written all this by hand. Where to start? My fingers touched the dark blue velvet binding gently before flipping through the first pages.

“Wait...” The red ribbon attached to the book set off where Blackwell had read last, right? Carefully, so as to not lose the exact page, I flipped pages until I reached the separation. “Okay, what’s this about?”

Egbaland, 1878.

One of the domestic servants, Omotola, the natives called her, stole a valuable jewel from one of the many properties of Madam Tinubu, the Iyalode of this land. I offered my services to the slave trader to retrieve her, but in truth, I was more interested in the other properties the girl possessed.

After hearing the stories of hurricanes tearing through fields in one moment and disappearing the next, of a girl dancing through the trees as if carried by the skies, I was sure she was one of the special girls—like the one I found in Beijing three years ago. Indeed, Tinubu surely had realized as well that there was something magical about the girl. She would never allow me to keep her. But, displaying the inscrutable countenance of the shrewd businesswoman she was, she offered me a trade instead: If I helped her to bring her servant, she would reveal to me the secret methods with which she has kept her home safe from the nightmares plaguing the outskirts of her city. A treasure she has buried somewhere deep under the earth.

“A treasure buried in the earth,” I repeated. What could she possibly bury that would keep phantoms away?

Indeed, as my travels have long shown, the nightmares stretched even as far as these lands. There were not many of them yet—a needed morsel of comfort in those days of uncertainty. It was the same as in the other lands. The phantoms’ sudden appearance on English soil thirteen years ago was but a temporary moment of terror. Then, after a year of recovery, they began appearing again. I had thought, after witnessing the horror in York, that the beasts would quickly overrun the world, destroying mankind. However, according to my observations, as well as the information I have received from the colonies, the phantoms attack only limitedly, at certain times, in certain areas. The attacks I had documented never lasted more than one hour. They would disappear. It was as if something was holding them back. As if they were, despite their devastating power, simply part of someone’s monstrous experiment—or the cruel game of a terrible god.

It was similar to what I had learned in school. The phantoms onlyappearedin 1865, but there weren’t too many attacks at first. They grew more frequent and widespread over time. It had given humanity a chance to survive in those early days when the technology wasn’t so good, a chance to fight back, a chance to advance and to plan even as people were killed and uprooted. I remember June had to do some billboard project on Nikola Tesla’s prototype antiphantom device for a science fair once. Super crude, but society had managed to build from it. Problem was that as the tech got better, the phantom attacks only grew more frequent, more widespread, until things became what they were now. And they weren’t going away.

But those early devices were about electromagnetic impulses and other sciencey garbage I didn’t get. This Tinubu woman had a “treasure” buried under the earth. How was that possible?

If it wasn’t science, it was magic. But whatkindof magic?

The British Crown had exhausted many of her resources learning about the dark beasts that roared death into the wind. But the people here had found a curious thing: Tinubu’s treasure. If I could bring both it and the girl with me back to Britain to study, it would only be in service to the Crown and the Sect.

I was surprised to see so many black markings on the page. I expected Blackwell would be the type to want to keep everything pristine and unblemished, but he’d circled the words “curious thing” and written the word “safe?” in the margins.

“What’s safe?” I whispered, and kept reading.

But was it indeed some buried contraption protecting Tinubu’s people from the dangers that raged outside? In my travels, I had found places such as these. Places of the purest calm. Of silence. Places where the very air was rich with the promise of heaven’s blessings. Here in Egbaland, I felt that same heavy air. The moment I stepped foot on these lands I knew it was the same as before. The same as those lands.

“Places of the purest calm.” If I closed my eyes I could imagine it. No, I couldrememberit. Calm that felt like clean silence all around you. But what Castor was referring to couldn’t have been the same as what I’d felt in Pastor Charles’s cellar. Could it? Pastor Charles didn’t know the cellar’s secrets. It was the traveling religious sect that had created it, and they’d never told him how. Was I just jumping to conclusions?

His spiel about phantoms and spirits hadn’t left my mind since we’d first met him in the church, but I still couldn’t make heads or tails of it. The cellar itself simply felt like it had more cylithium in it than you’d expect. That was the simpler explanation, not all this craziness about the universe, cosmic connections, life, death, and fate. But still, it was incredibly strange. Feeling calm and safe in a cylithium-rich area. How?

Blackwell was curious about it too. He underlined “those lands,” but wrote nothing next to it.

The door creaked. Oh god, did I not lock it? Ducking behind the desk was my first reflex, and a stupid one, because it wouldn’t take much effort to find me crouched here. It was too late to change my mind, though, because whoever it was had already entered the room. I held my breath, flinching at each footstep. Poor Crane was still safely inside the closet. As long as whoever it was didn’t come near this corner of the room, I wouldn’t be stuck in the awkward position of having to explain why I was breaking, entering, snooping, and hiding.

But it looked like I wouldn’t have to. I could hear the footsteps retreating, and the following softclickof the double doors.

Then... nothing. Whoever it was had left.

I waited for a minute more, listening until I was comforted enough by the silence to pop back out from under Blackwell’s desk.

“Hi!” Rhys waved at me from the other side of the desk.

My heart jumped into my throat as I stumbled back and nearly fell over Blackwell’s chair. Rhys leaned over the desk and, after catching me by the wrist, pulled me upright.

---